Supposedly that master GOP strategist Jared Kushner thinks the best strategy for Trumpublicans is to hold back on doing what a responsible President would do and address the nation on the feelings of anger and frustration so many feel at the murder of George Floyd. Instead by making drive by Tweets focusing on the violent few that he calls “thugs” (even though many are white and possibly supremacists who voted for him). The theory is that the suburban women who are fleeing the GOP to vote for Biden could come back if they feel threatened by the violence. This is the kind of message that could work if Trump were running against the incumbent party. As Nixon did in 1968. And while Nixon ran on “law and order” in light of the 1967-68 protests, he also ran against the outright racism of 3rd party candidate George Wallace
Trump’s current strategy seems to be to skip Nixon’s appeals for peace and go straight to the Wallace playbook–thus
We’ll see how that works out. Walla’ce was polling near 25% in the summer of ’68, but dropped to nearly half of that by Election Day.
The Trump Republicans deserve a similar routing now. It’s the only way to get a message across. Hopefully they, like Wallace did decades later, repent for their appeals to racism to win elections. But I hold no hope that Trump will ever do such,…
Scott @ Politicaldog101
image…Trump…slate…Wallace…gpbnews.org
“We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.
And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish.
Did we come all this way for this?
Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?
Listen to the answer to those questions.
It is another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting.
It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans — the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.
They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.
They are black and they are white — they’re native born and foreign born — they’re young and they’re old.
They work in America’s factories.
They run America’s businesses.
They serve in government.
They provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free.
They give drive to the spirit of America.
They give lift to the American Dream.
They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.
Like Theodore Roosevelt, they know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.
This I say to you tonight is the real voice of America. In this year 1968, this is the message it will broadcast to America and to the world.
Let’s never forget that despite her faults, America is a great nation.
And America is great because her people are great.
With Winston Churchill, we say: “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies because we are made of sugar candy.”
America is in trouble today not because her people have failed but because her leaders have failed.
And what America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people.”
Trump took what Nixon, Reagan and H.W. Bush had done on “law and order” and, as he does with everything, took it to its logical extreme.
“We must maintain law and order at the highest level or we will cease to have a country, 100 percent,” Trump said in a 2016 speech just days after a gunman had killed five police officers in Dallas. “We will cease to have a country. I am the law and order candidate.”
In his inaugural address, Trump painted a grim picture of an America under assault — and himself as the one person who was ready to clean up the streets. Here’s the key bit:
“But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — has trafficked heavily in fear: Of people who don’t look like you, of foreign countries, of losing what you have to someone who doesn’t deserve it. The subtext has become text.
Need more proof of that direct line between Nixon and Trump on using race to divide us? The President provided it himself on Tuesday morning.
“SILENT MAJORITY!” he tweeted.
Yeah, that about covers it.
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